Was that a little extra nip in the air? Traders apparently felt it Tuesday as, with a little prompting from a moderately higher screen, they sent cash numbers rising by as much as the low-teens, although a large majority of the upticks were less than a dime and a few small declines were thrown into the mix.

A Canadian cold front is due to be moving through the Great Plains today into the western Midwest, and that likely was what caused a sharp runup late in Midcontinent/Midwest prices, a marketer said. That was the most severe cold spell in sight as most other regions are expected to remain merely mild to cool. However, traders may have been looking down the road a bit to the National Weather Service’s forecast for next week, which calls for below normal temperatures in a curvy pattern running from the Northeast through the Midwest and Midcontinent into Texas and the Southwest.

Can yesterday’s mini-rally be sustained? As one might expect, opinion was mixed. But the prevalent opinion appeared to be that while futures probably wouldn’t take long to resume softening, cash might be able to hold up for a while longer based on the weather. That would be the natural thing to do, said a marketer. Noting that many traders have been commenting lately on how far back cash numbers have been from prompt-month futures (Henry Hub cash was more than 40 cents below the NYMEX settlement Tuesday), an attempt at some convergence should be expected, he said.

One trader reported Chicago citygates trading between $1.75 and $1.85 until 9:30 (by which time most deals had already been concluded), but then racing up 30 cents or so into the low $2.10s. He said rest-of-month pricing was running about a dime below current levels, so he was surprised that more people did not take gas out of storage to take advantage of the late pop. But another source said that might have been prevented by the storage injection policies of some pipelines, which sometimes limit withdrawal activity or the pace of new injections as the end of injection season nears. NGPL, the primary pipeline supplier of the Chicago market, is somewhat more rigid in that respect than others, he said.

Inland California and the desert Southwest remained the only localities with significant heat remaining, but prices at related trading points tended to reflect the overall market pattern with movement ranging from flat to about a dime up.

Florida citygates saw Tuesday’s biggest drop of a little more than a dime as temperatures begin to moderate in the state.

Three tropical waves were being tracked in westward moves across the Atlantic. However, it was the one farthest away, southwest of the Cape Verde Islands, that appeared strongest to one forecasting service.

“So much for the AGA guessing games,” sighed a source after hearing there will be no storage report today, and possibly not even tomorrow. AGA said problems with its web site related to the “Nimda” computer virus caused the report’s delay. However, at least one source felt no great loss over the announcement, saying that by this point the reports have become somewhat irrelevant due to the huge year-on-year storage surplus and the very limited space left for further injections.

Despite Tuesday’s modest gains, shut-in talk continued. One trader said he wasn’t sure if the cash market was near a bottom for now, “but I tell you this: we are going to hit a wall in October. There is no reason to buy [because] the market is flooded with gas. There won’t be much market for heating or cooling and we are looking at shut-ins. If we don’t get some extra demand or take gas off the system, we would be looking at prices going under a dollar.”

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